116. Finacial scenario.

Even if we fall short of the IMF option in favour of a run-of-the-mill severe recession, the consequences for Britain are going to be horrific. Roads and schools and hospitals will go unbuilt and unrepaired, medical treatments will go unbought, nurses and policemen and council workers will be laid off. Six hundred thousand jobs have been created in local government in the last few years. Most of them will have to go. And then the really gigantic argument will have to be had, over the public service pensions which are paid for out of current tax receipts. I don’t know anyone who has studied this problem who thinks the government will be able to afford them. Can you imagine the fights that are going to happen? The political polarisation between public and private sector employees, the savagery of the cuts, the bitterness of the arguments, the furious sense of righteousness on both sides? It’ll be Thatcher all over again, and the current period of managerial non-politics will seem as distant as the Butskellite consensus did in the 1980s.